In the small German town of Hünfeld, in the district of Fulda, lived Clara (Chaya) and Siegfried (Pinchas) Nussbaum. Pinchas worked at marketing agricultural produce from the country to the city. There were a little over 50 Jews in the town prior to the Nazis coming to power.

Pinchas was blonde, blue-eyed, and tall, which made him able to sneak into Nazi meetings to hear what was being said. He came home to his family, and said there was nothing left for Jews in Germany.

Pinchas was one of six brothers. One had died in an accident. In 1937, two left for the United States, and three, including Pinchas, immigrated to Israel (then Mandatory Palestine). Their parents initially felt they were too old to leave but when they wanted to, it was already too late to get them out. In 1942, they died on the way to Theresienstadt.

After the war, Sam Nussbaum (nicknamed Uncle Sam), one of the brothers who had immigrated to the United States and served in the U.S. Army, came back to Hünfeld and asked the neighbors if his parents had left anything for him.

The neighbors told him that before he was taken away, his father had left his sons a package, saying that one of them would come for it. The neighbor took down a box from the attic and handed it to Sam. Inside, he found some books, pillows, and a small Torah scroll, the kind used at shiva houses. One of the wooden handles (atzei chaim) had been broken.

Sam sent the box to the United States and from there, sent it on to Pinchas in Israel. Its arrival there in June 1946 coincided with two events: Black Sabbath (named Operation Agatha by the British) during which British soldiers and police searched for arms and made arrests in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and several dozen settlements. About 2,700 individuals were arrested.

That date also happened to be the bar mitzvah of Pinchas’s eldest son, David, who was the first to read from the retrieved Torah on Parshat Korach at the Mekor Chaim Synagogue in Petach Tikvah, where it still resides. The exception is when it’s taken out to be read at family bar mitzvahs and shivas, most recently at the shiva for David’s wife, Yocheved, z”l.

The shul gave a directive not to fix the broken handle of the Torah scroll in memory of the journey the scroll had made.

This Torah scroll is unique not only because it survived the Holocaust, but because it has accompanied, to date, the milestones and life events of at least six generations of the Nussbaum family, ken yirbu, in vivid illustration of the continuity and eternality of both the Jewish People and its beloved Torah.

*As heard from Adi Nussbaum and Shai Gilad.